Sons of Janissaries were not allowed to become Janissaries, although the rule began to be infringed about the end of Suleiman’s reign.[183] Sons of _Spahis_ of the Porte might be admitted as pages and to the corps of _Spahi-oghlans_, but their grandsons were rigidly excluded.[184] Sons of great officials were provided with fiefs, or pensions, and so usually passed out of the Ruling Institution into the territorial army.[185] Thus few were allowed in the scheme beyond the first generation in the Moslem faith, and almost none beyond the second. The explanation of this has been given already: descendants of renegades were Moslems, and hence subject to the same disqualifications as members of Mohammedan families of long standing. Not all Moslems of the empire were counted Ottomans, or, as they called themselves, Osmanlis, or, as they are commonly called nowadays, Turks; for Arabs, Kurds, and other Mohammedans who had not adopted the Turkish language did not bear the Turkish name. But all the descendants of members of the Ruling Institution were added to the Ottoman-Turkish nationality. The total number of Janissaries in the three centuries during which they were recruited from Christian children has been estimated at five hundred thousand;[186] but, as reckoned above, the tribute boys furnished less than one-half of the recruits of the institution,[187] and the page system persisted in its original form after the Janissaries had become hereditary. From one to two millions of the flower of the Christian population must have been brought into the Ottoman nation by the operation of the Ruling Institution. It does not necessarily follow that a like number of new Turkish families were thus founded. The Janissaries were not supposed to marry, although the rule was not strictly enforced;[188] a hundred years later, at any rate, the majority are said to have been unmarried.[189] As the _Spahis_ of the Porte probably married late, when they married at all, the whole system had thus something of a monastic aspect.[190] High officials, it is true, were apt to keep harems of some size; yet the children even of these were ordinarily few in number.[191] Furthermore, the frequent fierce wars carried off many of the sultan’s slaves, and the danger of execution and of confiscation of property put a check on their establishment of families. It is probable, therefore, that the Ruling Institution, like most great slave-families, was wasteful of human life.[192] But although its Christian-born members may not have perpetuated their numbers, they nevertheless increased the Ottoman nation by the addition of such children as were born to them; and the Moslem descendants of these, sailing in quieter waters, doubtless became, both numerically and otherwise, a great strength to the nation. II. THE EDUCATIONAL SCHEME